On 22 Jul 2003 13:05:13 GMT, ohawker (Andy
Evans) wrote:

Excerpt - Lynn Olsen

snip

If it were, why do stereo LP’s made 40 years ago, amplified with 65-year-old
direct-heated triodes, sound so much better than today’s digital sound played
through 0.001% THD mass-fi rack stereos?

Two points he

* this is a highly subjective statement ("sound much better" is
entirely in the perception of the listener - some may agree with this,
others disagree)

* the LPs of 40 years ago were made on using technology that can only
be considered crude by today's standards, and they were made to be
played using equipment that, in most cases, would be put to shame by a
contemporary no-name mini system (I still recall my father's delight
at having his Decca record player retrofitted w/ a stereo cartridge,
one channel of which went through the original amp and (built-in)
speaker, the other to a matching box w/ a second amp and speaker). If
40 year old recordings sound poor on modern equipment, maybe that's
because the latter does all too good a job of revealing the
inadequacies of the former.

The differences between mass-fi and
true high fidelity are as plain as day to an (open-minded) listener.

We are in the odd position of discovering that as speakers get better and
better, the true merits of vacuum-tube circuits become more and more evident.
After all, even J. Gordon Holt gave the Crown DC-300 transistor amplifier a
Class "A" rating in 1971. At the time, the modestly-priced Dyna Stereo 70
received a lower rating - yet with modern speakers, the DC-300 is unlistenable,
and the Dyna just keeps sounding better. The entry-level EL84 amps of the early
Sixties (Scott 299, Eico, and Dyna SCA-35) sound remarkably natural and
realistic with today’s more efficient, and much more transparent, speakers.

Given that the components referred to above are US in origin, and US
"mass-fi" equipment has been historically a very poor cousin of UK
equivalents, I'm not sure how valid this comparison is.

Julian

--
Julian Fowler
julian (at) bellevue-barn (dot) org (dot) uk